Healthcare plans

The 2010 annual enrollment season saw the opening of the floodgates regarding dependent eligibility, as employers were required under the health care reform law to extend coverage to all dependent children - regardless of student status - to age 26. This includes both married and unmarried dependent children, as well as those who are no longer dependents on their parents' tax returns.

Cigna Corp is expanding its business that provides health coverage to those working abroad by offering a product directly to individuals.

The Thomson Reuters 100 Top Hospitals study evaluates performance in 10 areas: mortality; medical complications; patient safety; average patient stay; expenses; profitability; patient satisfaction; adherence to clinical standards of care; post-discharge mortality; and readmission rates for acute myocardial infarction (heart attack), heart failure, and pneumonia.

Consumers are spending $363 billion a year on ancillary health care, according to a new study by Deloitte.

Contributions from employers to workers’ account-based health plans have dropped for the last two years, the Employee Benefit Research Institute reports.

Most health systems adopting an accountable care organization model will lose money during the first three years, according to a report published March 24 on the New England Journal of Medicine website.

An analysis of 43,600 patient accounts at North Shore Long Island Jewish Health System with balances greater than $50 at discharge shows that when a family's spending on health care exceeds 3.5% of income, a tipping point is reached on the ability to pay.

Customers are actually spending far more on their own health care costs than the government traditionally reports.

An analysis of Fidelity’s 74,000 HSA accounts has revealed several interesting trends regarding contribution rates and spending behavior.

A sluggish economy hasn’t slowed the nation’s health care consumerism movement, according to a recent analysis by the Employee Benefit Research Institute.

Troubles are mounting for a health insurer over loss of several server drives containing enrollee and employee information.

Even after plan design changes, employers can expect their health care costs to increase by 7% in 2011, a sure sign that an aggressive approach to plan design is here to stay, finds research by the National Business Group on Health and Towers Watson.

Benefit professionals have tirelessly lobbied for an end to the so-called use-it-or-lose it rule governing pretax employee contributions to a flexible spending account, which is now the centerpiece of a bipartisan proposal in Congress.

Four medical associations representing more than 350,000 primary care physicians have issued new guidelines for patient-centered medical home recognition and accreditation programs.

A new report from Kalorama Information, a New York-based research firm, estimates the U.S. electronic health records market at nearly $15.8 billion and predicts it will increase to $31.9 billion in 2015.

Democratic senators on Tuesday expressed concern that companies hired to help pay and oversee medical claims under the Medicare health insurance program may have costly conflicts of interest.

Last month, the Center for Health Value Innovation released its 2010 Value-Based Design Report - a study of more than 170 companies, representing more than 4 million covered lives, produced in partnership with Buck Consultants - which takes the national temperature on how value-based benefits designs are progressing in U.S. workplaces.

Some of you may remember exercise instructors such as Jane Fonda or the late Jack LaLanne. When I was a kid, my mom had Jack LaLanne exercise books.

For once, we weren't trying to innovate, iterate or invest in something new. We simply wanted to successfully launch a consumer-driven health plan. We thought it would be easy, since many employers had already delved into these issues before us.

For many of us who travel by plane, post-9/11 security restrictions have changed the way we prepare. Our packing has changed, our attire has changed and we now enter the airport hoping to make it through the screening, scanning and patting down with our humor intact.